The Good Neighbor (26 page)
Years earlier, when Hamish was just a boy, he’d begun to sus pect that there was something wrong with Musgroves in general. Lately, he had become sure of it. He would always remember the day on which he’d learned of his father ’s death, how he’d lain on the boards of the porch and looked up at the dried, withered scalps of the aborigines the Captain had murdered in some far-off place, waving back and forth in the breeze like an unholy wind chime. It was a moment that came back to him frequently throughout his life. He often thought of it in the middle of doing something else, though he didn’t know why, and he had to force himself to put the image out of his mind. But it wasn’t until late in life that he fi nally made the connection he’d sought between worlds on that long-ago day, one so obvious he couldn’t believe he hadn’t spotted it sooner: the Musgroves were doomed because they were killers.
Yet Hamish didn’t even know how right he was. He thought his father was the only one who had ever murdered anyone, a fact that he sought to verify with his sister after he finished Freud’s book.
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“Did Father ever tell you stories about the old days?” he asked Ellen, who, though she was his fraternal twin, had never looked anything like him: she was short and round like their mother, while Hamish was lanky and lean, with a hawkish nose. The only physical characteristic they shared, in fact, was that they were both left-handed—a trait her teachers had tried, and failed, to eradicate.
“What old days, Hamish?” she replied.
“His days on the frontier. And of the times before then, when our family was still in England.”
“Perhaps he did. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“I
think
I remember,” Hamish said. “They were terrible stories. Very bloody. I never listened to him much, but I wish now that I had.”
“For goodness’ sake, Hamish, why bring that up now? Those days are long over. It’s the twentieth century!”
“Yes, but those scalps,” he said. “Don’t you remember the Injun scalps on the porch? How they hung from the rafters?”
“Scalps? Don’t be ridiculous. There was no such thing. How barbaric!”
But Hamish insisted; he was certain he wasn’t making it up. “I remember them quite well,” he said. “He used to tell the story of how he took them whenever we had company. How it felt like skinning a ’possum. Remember?”
Ellen laughed. “Our father, telling such stories!” she said. “Hon estly, Hamish, I think you’ve been reading too many novels! What makes you bring this up in the first place?”
Ordinarily, Hamish would have fallen silent here, for he’d never quite been able to bring himself to tell his sister what he was thinking: modern Musgroves were cursed. But that was before reading Freud’s little book. What he said instead was:
“I think that I would like to go to Europe, and visit a psychia trist.”
It was a Friday evening, and they’d been sitting quietly in the
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parlor, which was how they spent every evening. Nothing could have prepared Ellen for such a statement. She looked as if she’d been shot through the heart. She put one hand to her chest and used the other to steady herself, even though she was already seated.
“A . . . what?” she quavered.
“A psychiatrist,” Hamish repeated. “A mental doctor.” “A
mental doctor
? What—what—what—”
“There’s no need for excitement, Ellie. Everything is fine. It’s— it’s just an idea I had.”
“But, Hamish! What on earth for?”
“Well, because it’s
new
,” Hamish told her. “It’s the modern way of looking at things. There’s this fellow, Freud”—he pronounced it “Frood”—“who lives in Europe. In Vienna, to be exact. He has the most amazing ability to talk to people and figure out what’s wrong with them. And I simply thought that perhaps I should go and meet him, and have him tell me what’s wrong with
me
.”
“But, Hamish! There’s nothing wrong with you!”
Hamish had rather expected her to say this, but now that she had, he was at a loss for words. He looked around at their apart ment, which they’d moved into five years earlier. For thirty-five years previous to that, they’d lived in a house, but as they’d got ten older they found it too much to maintain. Hamish’s back troubled him after decades spent huddled over a desk, his left arm twisted around awkwardly so that he could scrawl figures with his wrong hand, while his vision had dimmed and blurred; and the ever-plumper Ellen had found it increasingly difficult to climb the stairs. It was she who’d insisted they move to a smaller place, one that would require less work. Come to think of it, it was she who’d always insisted on everything. Hamish had not envisioned spending his entire life in the company of his sister. He’d hoped to have children and grandchildren, and be the patriarch of a vast and happy clan.
But none of that had happened. Nothing, in fact, had worked
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out quite the way he’d thought it would. His entire life had been one of boredom, sadness, and frustration. Musgroves were still cursed, he thought; only now the curse took a form more appro priate to the world they lived in.
The world, in Hamish’s lifetime, had become a very different place—almost
too
different. Automobiles chugged up and down the streets, and from every manufacturing facility came the crash and whir of automatic machinery. None of these things had been known in Hamish’s youth. It was as if they’d been installed overnight. Young people now, too, were an entirely different kind of person—they went to moving-picture shows and soda foun tains, and “spooned” without shame, and used jargon that no one else could understand. One could hardly tell whether they were being disrespectful or not, though Hamish suspected the latter. And there was a railroad now that stretched clear across the con tinent. Instead of sailing all the way around the tip of South America and back up again to get to California, a journey that used to take months, one could go overland, and be there in a mat ter of weeks. And in Europe, soldiers were slaughtering each other with devices of war that had never even been heard of before, or imagined.
Things in general seemed to be moving about ten times as fast as they had when Hamish was a boy. There was no room in a time like this for ghosts and family curses, Hamish realized—not, at least, in the traditional sense. No one believed in such things any more. Yet that didn’t mean they had ceased to exist. They’d merely changed, like everything else, to infect the one thing that
hadn’t
changed: the human heart.
“Yes, there is something wrong with me,” Hamish said now. “Look at what has happened to us, Ellie. Five of our brothers and sisters gone almost as soon as they came into the world, and now Margaret and Olivia taken by influenza just this year. Seven of us dead. And you and I living here like rabbits in this city, old and alone and—”
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“We are not alone!” Ellen interrupted, sounding panicked. “We have each other!”
Hamish looked at his sister.
“Ellie,” he asked quietly, “why did you never want to marry?” Ellen always had her hands occupied with some small task:
knitting, or cross-stitching, or, in later years, a newspaper word- puzzle. At present she was engaged in making a pair of booties, in tended for the granddaughter of a woman who lived down the hall. She flung her needles down now and stood, gasping for breath.
“How dare you ask me that!” she screamed at her brother. “How dare you ask me that! After all the sacrifices I’ve made for you!”
Hamish didn’t blink; he merely sat, watching her.
“Yes, but why?” he repeated. “After all, I never forced you to stay with me. I tried to introduce you to—”
“Be quiet, Hamish!” Ellen said, imploring him now. “For God’s sake, please, be quiet!”
“But Ellie,” Hamish said, keeping his voice low and reasonable. “I’m merely asking—”
“Oh, go and see your mentalist, damn you!” cried his sister. “Let him find out whatever it is that’s bothering you! Maybe then you can leave me in peace!”
She stormed out and went to her bedroom, where she locked the door. Even an hour later, when Hamish thought she might have calmed down, he could still hear her sobbing; he tapped gen tly, but she ignored him, crying her eyes out, sounding for all the world like a ten-year-old girl.
“I don’t understand,” he muttered to himself, heading back to his easy chair. “I simply don’t understand.” It wasn’t like Ellen to lose her temper; he hadn’t seen her so upset, in fact, since the day almost thirty years earlier, when their mother had called all the children home for the Blessing of the Stones. It didn’t occur to him that these two incidents were related, that they stemmed
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from the same root, even though they were separated by so much time. Hamish had no idea, in fact, that for his sister, time had been standing still for well over half a century, ever since McNally came to Adencourt. What was more, he also had no idea that be cause he’d chosen to live with her all this time, he had been under the same, simple spell, and that all he had to do to escape it was to leave.
There is still something desperately wrong
, he thought as his head drooped slowly toward his chest, Ellen still sobbing in her bed room.
That’s the only possible explanation. We are innocents. We have done nothing. Our only crime was to try to live. We must never go back to Adencourt, Ellen and I, or we might yet be taken, too
—for he felt that same old apprehension creeping over him now that had pervaded all the years of his childhood. He had no wish, like some old men, to visit the place of his birth once more. He wished he had never seen it to begin with.
I wonder if I will ever make it to Vienna,
was his last thought, be fore dropping off to sleep.
Where Old Machines Come to Die
I
n the afternoon, her stomach in knots, Francie headed up the plowed road on foot to the house at the top of the hill. It was not
a visit she looked forward to, but she felt she had to make it. These people were going to be their neighbors, after all, and she desperately wanted to be on good terms with them. She under stood, as Colt did not seem to, that such touches were vital to their happiness. Perhaps she could smooth things over—make them understand that she didn’t feel the way Colt felt, and that he would not be allowed to desecrate their cemetery. She thought she understood how Flebberman felt, maybe, just a little bit. He’d grown up in that place. Those people in the graves were his peo ple. He must certainly think they were interlopers, with no right to make permanent alterations.
Flebberman had been angry, and she was not good with angry people. They scared her, in fact. But she forced herself step by step
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up the hill, dreading what he would say to her, not sure what she should say to him, except that she came in peace.
The snow had begun to melt, and the trickling sounds all around her, made by unseen rivulets in the roadside ditches, re minded Francie of spring. She wondered if all this snow was here to stay, or if there was going to be a late thaw before winter set tled over them for good. She hoped it would melt. She wasn’t ready for winter yet. It hadn’t even occurred to her until today that she would have no car of her own. It had been nearly ten years since she’d needed one, after all. And apparently it hadn’t occurred to Colt, either. He’d taken off and left her without any form of transportation—or food, besides the little she’d bought at the supermarket. She was accustomed to stepping out the door, walking three blocks, and heading down into a subway station or hailing a cab. But those days would not be missed, for the station always smelled like urine, even in winter, and on hot, steamy af ternoons it was unbearable.
She smoothed her hair self-consciously in preparation for being scrutinized. And she had brought a gift to smooth the way: a sort- of-new, or at least unopened, paper bag of herbal tea from a spe cialty shop in Manhattan. She’d found it in among the kitchen supplies and peeled off the price tag, recreasing the edges of the bag to make it look newer.
